Sea Turtles are coming!

More Sea Turtles are coming!

The idea to do sea turtles first came to me while I was preparing to design something for my quilt guild, The Cotton Patch Quilters.   I knew that I wanted to go acrylic, but it took a few weeks to finale the idea on a Caribbean waters theme.  

The turtle was created using watercolor paint on a special fabric.   I use Inktense watercolor pencils and blocks and a special non-water based liquid called Fabric Medium.  There are at least 2 coats of watercolor, but it sometimes takes more to perfect the blending between colors.

I knew that it was going to need a lot of detail and I eventually had the idea to hand embroider the shell and limbs.  I had taken an on-line hand embroidery class the previous year and the two meshed perfectly, but it is very time consuming.   It can take between 3-4 hours to embroider each turtle and around 30 minutes to applique them onto the canvas.  The painted fabric is very stiff and takes a lot of finicky tucking and slow machine stitching.  Monofilament thread is also tricky to work with, since it's nearly invisible. 

Here is a section of the overall Caribbean waters piece that I named Tropically Submerged. You can see more photos and learn more about the Tropically Submerged in the blog post here.

I began working on the new sea turtles a few weeks and and just finished painting the background canvas this weekend. 

Two of the turtles have been appliqued to their ocean and 'Seaweed' has been fused to their canvases.